sted in actual time for forty-seven years longer; and for
more than the first thirty of them fresh and ever fresh acts and scenes
carried it on. For the public his place was taken once and for all by
the _History of the French Revolution_, which, after alarming
vicissitudes (John Stuart Mill having borrowed the first volume in MS.
and lent it to a lady, to be destroyed by her housemaid), appeared in
1837. From at least that time Mrs. Carlyle's aspiration was fulfilled.
There were gain-sayers of course,--it may almost be said that genius
which is not gainsaid is not genius,--there were furious decriers of
style, temper, and so forth. But nine out of every ten men at least
whose opinion was worth taking knew that a new star of the first
magnitude had been added to English literature, however much they might
think its rays in some respects baleful.

Lecturing, after the example set chiefly by Coleridge and Hazlitt, was
at this time a favourite resource for those men of letters whose line
of composition was not of the gainfulest; and Carlyle delivered several
courses, some of which are unreported while others survive only in
inadequate shapes. But _Heroes and Hero-Worship_ was at first delivered
orally, though it was not printed till 1841; and about the same time, or
rather earlier, appeared the _Miscellaneous Essays_--a collection of his
work at its freshest, least mannered, most varied, and in some respects
best. _Chartism_ (1839) and _Past and Present_ (1843) reflected the
political problems of the time and Carlyle's interest in them. But it
was not till 1845 that a second, in the ordinary sense, great work,
_Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, was published. Five years
passed without anything substantive from him, but in 1850 appeared
_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, the most brilliantly satiric, and in 1851 the
softest, most finished, and (save theologically) least debatable of all
his books, the exquisite biography in miniature called the _Life of
Sterling_. Then he engaged, it is difficult to say whether by ill-luck
or not, on the last and largest of his great single undertakings, the
_History of Frederick the Great_. Fourteen years were passed, as a
matter of composition, in "the valley of the shadow of Frederick," as
his wife put it: half the time (from 1858 to 1865) saw the actual
publication. Shortly after the completion of this, Carlyle visited
Edinburgh to receive the Lord Rectorship of his University, and soon
aft